FREE SPEECH OR HATE SPEECH?
It isn't "free speech," it is hate speech. This week there was outrage when the Daily Mail published a cartoon showing refugees crossing the border into Europe alongside rats. And when Katie Hopkins referred to "swarms of migrants" as "feral" and "cockroaches" earlier this year there was, quite rightly, widespread condemnation from Britain's ever-chattering classes. Referencing the holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, pointed out that freedom of expression is not absolute and words can lead to violence: "History has shown us time and again the dangers of demonizing foreigners and minorities.""On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. 'Thank you so much for all you've done for us girls!' I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy, be-ringed paw that clutched it… Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women's liberation emblem. I should have said, 'You're a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.' The transvestite [sic] held me in a rapist's grip." - Germaine Greer in The Independent: 'On why sex change is a lie,' July 22, 1989
A BUNCH OF FUCKING HYPOCRITES
I sympathize. To call out transphobia, unless blood has been spilled, is a also hazardous enterprise in Britain. It, too, draws the accusation of hypersensitivity. Just like that time HOWARD JACOBSON dismissed trans people as "touchy fools" for calling out Greer's bigotry:"It is hard to decide whether they were being cynical or naive. Could they really have supposed there would be no spillage from their hyperbole? The last century teaches that extremity can pass from refined discourse to street barbarism in no time at all. And if the mob detects the sweet cordite-like smell of anti-semitism in your prose, that's because it's there. To call out anti-semitism, unless blood has been spilt, is a hazardous enterprise in Britain. It draws the accusation of hypersensitivity."
Ah well, not to worry then. It's not like a 21-year-old trans woman was found dead in a men's prison last week. Anti-semitism in the media can lead to barbarism in no time at all, but transphobia in the media is just a lovely, invigorating poem. The way people think about trans people and the way people treat trans people are clearly completely unrelated."It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated… To be easily offended is to be shut off from the invigoration of that argumentative give-and-take we call liberty; not to understand the poetics of provocation is to miss out on the joys of living in a literate and robust society that excels at satire and burlesque."
FREE SPEECH!
FREEZE PEACH
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL, PARIS?
HYPOCRITES HALL OF FAME
Martin Luther King was "gravely disappointed" in what he called "white moderates" during the black civil rights movement and I can really empathize. The biggest stumbling block for trans equality in 2015 isn't extreme, rabid bigots like Milo Yiannopoulos, but rather that giant mass of 'liberals' who support equality in word but not deed. I'm subjected to death threats and personal abuse on social media all the time—even from mainstream journalists—and does anybody condemn that? There is a shameful body of people who stay silent when they see others being abused or, indeed, deflect attention away from that abuse."OF COURSE it is terrible for trans people," cry Greer's supposedly liberal defenders… "BUT." It is always followed by "but." "I knew a trans person once and I'm really lovely," they tell us. This too is always followed by "but." And this "but" is always followed by some sermon on how wonderful it is that we have so many middle aged voices rallying to man the barricades in defense of free speech because of that unstoppable force—perhaps 0.05 percent of the population who are trans—threatening to destroy the very fabric of society. "Free speech is the cornerstone of a civilized society," they cry and it's a compelling argument. I'd hate to live in a savage world where people were made homeless and attacked and murdered and driven to suicide (like trans people routinely are in our current free speech utopia) because students had destroyed democracy."I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.'"- Extract from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, April 16, 1963